PSYC 380 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Animal Communication, Aphasia, Auditory Cortex
Document Summary
Symbolic - units that stand for the referent of the word: e. g. cars stands for plural in english. Linguistic universals: attributes shared by natural human languages that distinguish them from animal communication, semanticity. Sound of human language conveys meaning: arbitrariness. Arbitrary connection between the units (sounds, words) in a language and what they refer to. Not true for iconic languages (asl, dance of the bees) We can change those connections and invent new ones (e. g. facebook ) Name all of the objects in our environment, o: displacement. The ability to talk about something other than the present moment/ environment (e. g. past tense, future tense: productivity. We can generate infinite # of utterances o. Beyond arbitrariness, no animal communication system exhibits characteristics that qualify it as language: no spontaneous use, primates have been taught sign language and other such non-vocal languages with modest success.
